How to Send Your Slugs to Your Neighbor's Yard

A healthy well-drained soil does not attract pests or diseases. To get rid of slugs, make your soil water-retentive, and they will all migrate to your neighbor's.

No Kidding!

I am not kidding, even though I decided to post this catchy title on April Fools' Day. I am also posting it in time for Earth Day, because it will show you how to get rid of pests in an environmentally friendly way.

So I am not kidding. I really did send my slugs to my neighbor's, or at least my neighbor thinks that I did, although I was not aware of it until years later.

After the demolition of my garden in 1998, a University of Manitoba landscape architecture professor brought his graduating class to visit my garden to hear about my organic methods. He had visited my garden years ago after having heard about my methods from another landscape architecture professor who teaches at the Agricultural College in Old's, Alberta. He had heard about me while visiting in Winnipeg and had asked if he could take photographs of my garden. He wanted to use them to illustrate innovative gardening methods.

Well, at the time the Winnipeg professor had first visited my garden, I was not at home, so he had talked to my next-door neighbor instead. She had complained to him that I had sent her all my slugs.

I did not realize that she had a slug problem, because I certainly did not. It seemed that these pests respected the border between the properties, just like the aphids, the cutworms, and any other assorted pests.

Let me think this through. How did it happen?

Raising Slugs as Fish Food

The year in which I started my very own organic garden, I had my hands full collecting slugs off plants every evening. I fed many of them to my goldfishes, and that year, I raised the fattest and most aggressive goldfishes you ever met. When you drop a slug into water, it straightens out to look like a fish. The little ones, in fact, look like the little danios. Those slugs got snatched up by the much larger goldfish in an instant. There was just one problem. When the season ended and I had no more slugs to feed these spoiled fat goldfishes, they started gobbling up the real danios in their tank.

One day, my husband came running out into the garden in desparation, telling me that Horse, the ruling goldfish at the time, was devouring the danios. "Why didn't you throw a blanket over the tank?" I asked him. Men! They don't think like fishes or any other creature.

The copyright of the article How to Send Your Slugs to Your Neighbor's Yard in Natural Health is owned by Traute Klein, biogardener. Permission to republish How to Send Your Slugs to Your Neighbor's Yard in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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